The Edge: Chapter I
by soavezefiretto
Summary: Very strange, very angsty. The rating is for disturbing images. Who can help Will Riker before madness claims him? Please review, thanks. Chapter two up!!!
1. Terror

Disclaimer: Who owns the thoughts of people created by other people? Think about it... But, just in case, yes I KNOW I don't own anything that belongs to Star Trek, and I'm not making any profit out of this. Yes, I SWEAR, ok?  
  
Comment: I always thought it a shame that the character of Will Riker was given so little depth. And this stiff little tilt to his body intrigued me, it made me think he was always teribly tense, as if fighting to control something inside him. In MY Star Trek world, William Riker is a poet, hunted by a creativity he himself chose to repress...  
One last thing: Imzadi fans might not like this, and when he thinks about the captain - it's NOT what you think!  
  
Review: Oh yes PLEASE!! You can mail me too - soavezefiretto@hotmail.com. (Oh, and please remember english is not my native language, thanks!)  
  
  
The Edge  
  
  
It is cold in the hole. The cold eats at you. It eats at you. Literally, I mean. The cold eats bits off you, there are little parts of your body, of your flesh missing, chunks bitten off by the cold. It hurts, but it doesn't bleed because all the blood in your veins is frozen.  
And it is dark, so very very dark that after a while your eyes fall out, and you can follow them with your minds eye, rolling about the floor, this way and that. Until they stop, and then there is nothing anymore.   
  
But I am not in the hole yet. I am walking on the edge, where the cuts on my naked feet still bleed.  
  
  
One  
  
"Good morning." She smiles warmly over her hot chocolate. I nod and figure I must be smiling too, since there is no suspicion on her face. I say "good morning" and stare at her white hands, suddenly cut off the wrists and lying, palms up, on either side of the cup. While I watch the blood from her wrists dripping into the chocolate and diluting it, I make a remark about her mentioning a couple of days ago that she had decided to *definitely* cut back on the ingestion of cocoa-based products. "I did, and I will, but not today. Today is going to be hard enough as it is." She goes on talking, we tell each other what we will be doing. I offer dinner, but she thinks she'll turn in early. As I cross the door and step into the corridor, reality falls apart not for the first and certainly not for the last time today. I disappear, I am nothing but fear. Two decks away from the bridge, in the turbolift, I die, and when I step onto it, I am safely dead. As usual, he is the only one to notice. He gives his head this peculiar little jerk. He looks at me and I can't stand it, he knows everything about me, he knows about her hands being cut off and the blood dripping into the chocolate and diluting it and all the other visions of horror I have been witnessing over the last weeks - months actually. Visions I am not creating, they simply come to me and I watch in silence. They don't speak to me and I don't speak to them. I bear witness, just as he bears witness to the creeping madness clouding me.  
  
Another man. This one has the aristocratic profile of an antique bronze coin, hands like an eagle, tender eyes. Eyes like an eagle, tender hands. I used to bodily ache to be understood by him, I used to cry in my sleep without even knowing it, so much did I long to be touched by him in some way. If I could stir the feeling and compassion of a man like this, it would be redemption, I was sure of it. But redemption never happened, his feelings have always been barred to me. His hands (his *tender* hands) around my throat strangle me. There has been less and less air, but it hasn't been like this always. There was a time when I didn't *need* air, there was a time when I wasn't falling through the holes my own mind creates, there was a time of peace and absence.  
  
Lately I have been spending a lot of time in sickbay. I *feel* sick, and I don't like that. I don't like the disorientation, I thought I knew who I was, damn it! "You have to take it easy, Will, if you insist on stressing yourself out like this you'll end up just snapping", she says. Keep me from snapping, Beverly, keep me sane. "I certainly don't *insist* on anything, Doctor, and besides, it's just a headache", I reply foolishly. "You've been in here with headaches and muscular cramps of all kinds every day for the last three weeks, and even before that on a pretty regular basis. You must know as well as I do that, whatever your problem is, I can't cure it with aspirins or massages." Her eyes are blue like a true heart, for a moment all the quiet and strength I need seem to lie in her translucent hands. I look away fast because I don't want to see them cut off. This vision of her and me naked I *have* created myself: it is simple, just us standing, facing each other, but *I* willed it, and the knowledge that I have the ability to do this is akin to a revelation. Involuntarily, I touch her face. She smiles. "Have you talked to Deanna?" These words shatter my vision, and I feel the cold and dark of the hole lashing out at me. But fear is something I am used to, so I soon am what she would know as "my usual self" again. 


	2. Love

Two (Love)  
  
How is it that my soul can't read my soul? Every day terror haunts me, I wake up with cockroaches in my mouth, I walk around on sharp knifes like the goddamn little mermaid - and she smiles at me, the same smile I fell for: affectionate, sexy as hell, but always a little removed. Is it that she can't help feeling superior, in spite of the obvious attraction she still feels for me? How can she smile at all the filth and anguish I carry around with me and that's threatening to choke me? Can't she feel it, can't she fucking *sense* it?? Beverly can sense it, Geordi can, Data certainly can, even Worf has been giving me odd looks, and the captain... well, no, the captain has never been all that sensitive when it comes to me. But Deanna, my Imzadi...? Oh my love, why have you left me?  
  
Maybe the answer is closeness. She is me and I am her, and being one it is difficult to know things for what they are. She may not be seeing this darkness, or she may be taking it for her own. We all have our darkness...  
  
Maybe the answer is love. It is never what we expect, never what we want. Or is it the end of love? If everything is coming to an end, if what I thought was myself is falling apart, why wouldn't my love vanish too? This thought would have killed me a year, six months ago, but now nothing stirs inside me, I am numb. Maybe I never loved her, and she never loved me.  
  
I saw her naked and went after her, then we made love in a forest and she called me her Imzadi. I had never been anything for anyone since my mother died, and now I was this beautiful woman's Imzadi. Her first one, her beloved. How could I *not* give her my heart and live my life through her, through her coming and her going, her presence, her absence, her looks and her loves...?   
  
Is this what I did: sell my soul? And what for: to belong.  
  
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Hurt me. Hurt me, come on hurt me, I deserve it! Hit me, split this head open, so all the darkness can pour outside and leave me behind a blank, a nothing... oh for nothingness! Hit me harder! Come on...  
  
"You are not concentrating!" I have made him angry. Good.  
  
"Oh, I am concentrating Worf. Maybe you're just too good for me. That's why I practice with you, I would go for nothing but the best."  
  
"No. You had reached a much higher level long before today, Commander. You seem to have lost the most basic skills. If we continue, I will seriously hurt you."  
  
"Well, if you hurt me, I will have deserved it. C'mon, let's go on." I am losing the heat, I long for the rush of fury,and then the pain, and then nothing - for a short, merciful time.   
  
"Commander..."  
  
"Do I have to make this an order?"   
  
"I will not be the one to punish you."  
  
"What the hell are you talking about?"  
  
"You have been fighting as if you wanted to be hurt. And not only today, but for many weeks past.At first I thought you were using the bat'leth training to focus your mind, as I do sometimes. But our praticing is clearly not helping you. I do not wish to continue."  
  
"In case you overheard it the first time, I'll say it only once more: you will continue to be my sparring partner as long as I se fit. This is a direct order by a superior officer."  
  
"You are also my friend, and I will not assist you in your attempts at self-destruction."  
  
He's leaving me, even he...   
  
"Don't go, Worf, please..." This is what I am now, a weak, whimpering excuse for a human being, down on my knees begging to this beautiful, strong, noble-minded creature.  
  
"How can I help you?"  
  
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Last night, she came to me. She was as I always remember her. The uniform, the suspicious look in her eyes, the half-smile that didn't quite dare to become a laugh. I never really saw her laugh, but I was confident I would, some day. That was back then, when the future still existed.  
  
I ran to her, and she didn't dissolve as I touched her, and I cried for the sheer miracle to be allowed to hold on to something, to someone. She held my hands in hers and kissed my lips many times. She couldn't speak because she was dead, but with her eyes she told me of the place she came from, of things of brightness and light, and she told me it was allright if I wanted to hold those things in my mind, even though I wasn't dead yet.   
  
I am not dead. Who can tell me if I want to live? 


End file.
